Combining Confluence with Lithium User Community

[Scott Genzer]

very interesting! And what are you using for support tix?

[Monique vdB]

@Scott Genzer yes, exactly. :)

[Monique vdB]

I should answer the rest of your questions too! Although I suspect our Community Champions will have more thoughts on the technical aspects of the question.

1. Correct, we redirect to Confluence and have cross-linking. I believe it's possible to open up documentation for collaboration, but I'll let the Confluence experts weigh in on that.

2. We do use Jira for bug tracking but also we have dedicated support staff on the community who help users directly here and escalate as needed internally. So it's another channel for support and often is faster for users since we also have power users who can help troubleshoot issues.

3. We have Atlassian University and Certification -- we're working to get more aligned as time goes on with the community, but it is a separate system.

4. I will ping the support team on this one!

[Scott Genzer]

RapidMiner Community stats at this moment:

oh no - never heard of Questions for Confluence. Thank you. And yet you choose to use Lithium instead of your own product - is this due to the spam and volume as you mentioned above?

[Monique vdB]

@Scott Genzer what's the size of your community? Curious if you've looked into Questions for Confluence.

[Scott Genzer]

Hi @Monique vdB thanks so much for your reply. Your community does look great (yes well done Atlassian design team).

RapidMiner's setup right now is similar to yours in many ways with a similar user base (helping very techie users with their software).  Note that our software, like Sourcetree for example, is desktop software for a variety of reasons.

Our "stack" is also somewhat similar to Atlassian; we use Lithium for community, JIRA + Sourcetree/BitBucket for internal dev + Confluence for documentation (yes we love Atlassian! :) ). However we currently use other software for training/education and support tix.

We are not 100% happy with this stack and are in the exploration stages of finding a more seamless way of having our users get the help, training, and support they need, when they need it, and in the most efficient manner for both our users and for us.  Some "pain points" include:

1. Documentation: we have in-product documentation that our users find very helpful, but it does not synchronize with our current "master KB" in Confluence nor with our KB pages in Lithium. It seems to me that you don't do KB at all here in Lithium but redirect completely to Confluence which does make some sense...but it does not allow users to contribute, correct?
2. Bug reporting: if our desktop software finds an error, we encourage our users to report a bug. Currently this is a redirect to our Lithium community's "Product Feedback" pages which are then manually synchronized with JIRA - a major pain for our development team.  I see you use JIRA for this, of course. How does that work? Do you get lots of newbies posting lots of stuff that is really support?
3. Training/Education: we have many tutorials and so forth in-product which our users like, but again we run a LMS outside of product for more "formal" training (Moodle in our case). This is not ideal to say the least.
4. Support: we are looking for a more seamless transition from community to support ticket to documentation etc...

It's a lot to look at but would love to hear plusses/minuses of what Atlassian is doing and share ideas.  Thank you!

Scott

[Kevan Lin]

Hi! :) Thanks for the kind words! Please head over to the Atlassian Design System's site if you want to read about it more. 

And yes, if you have more specific questions regarding the design system, please ask and I'll try my best to answer them to the best of my abilities. 

Welcome to the community!

[Monique vdB]

Hi @Scott Genzer -- all our Atlassian sites are under the same design umbrella, which is why they have a unified look and feel. (Hooray for our awesome design team!) However, our documentation is on Confluence whereas our community sits on Lithium.  (The biggest reasons for that being robust integrated spam management and sheer scale.) 

If there are specific pages or elements you're wondering about, please let us know. The community face of our design team is @Test User KL :)